Rhapsodies in Scrap - 2009-10 MCKNIGHT VISUAL ARTISTS EXHIBITION MCAD Gallery | July 9 - August 13, 2010
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Rhapsodies in Scrap 2009–10 MCKNIGHT VISUAL ARTISTS EXHIBITION MCAD Gallery | July 9 – August 13, 2010
Scrap Engines #1, 2009, Conté crayon on drafting film, 18.5 x 23 inches. Photograph by Charles Walbridge. Three years ago, Michael Kareken looked out his studio window and saw a mountain of cardboard at the RockTenn recycling plant across the street. The mountain had always been there—or, replenished regularly, one like it had—but he had never paid much attention to it before. That day was different. He had been painting portraits for some time—intimate, expressive depictions of family and friends—and was aware he was nearing the end of a cycle. Satisfying as this work had been, he needed a change. The man-made mountain suddenly caught his eye. He went to investigate and was immediately hooked, fascinated by its unexpected formal beauty. He then visited Eureka Recycling as well as other local waste management centers, astonished by the visual splendor of the heaped discards that form the underside of daily life in Magnet, 2010, oil on canvas, 68 x 50 inches. contemporary America.
Asking himself different questions about the process of painting, about form and content,
Kareken altered his working habits. For instance, he painted from photographs he had taken
while on-site. He was trained to work from life but discovered he liked working from photos,
reveling in the details they provided, details that he might otherwise have dismissed or
overlooked. At first, he scrupulously adhered to the images captured as documents but soon
began to make aesthetic adjustments. He focused on certain images, such as gridded bales of
crushed paper or the huge magnet that picked up scrap steel, and made multiple versions
of them, gorgeous atmospheric drawings and paintings that suggest Tiepolo in the flamboyance
of their brushwork and lush palette, as realistic objects cascade into flurries of abstract
gesture. But it was Edwin Dickinson he cited. Dickinson, he said, was a realist but incorporated
accident into his paintings. “I want to be able to interrupt my process, to interrogate it,
and see what happens.”
His most recent work concentrates on glass bottles in an all-over composition that suggests
a kind of light-filled, dazzled impressionism. His paintings fluctuate between realism and
abstraction, a formal construction underlying the representational, their painterliness
and deftly applied brushstrokes less agitated, more tautly vibrant. There is a perspectival
shift as he zooms in from a broad view of the scene to close-ups of the specific objects.
Some of these new works, although all-over, have a subtle X configuration, and the composition
radiates from the center, the bottles there clearly delineated. As the eye moves toward the
edges, however, the images become blurred, more abstract. Drips are left to mark the process,
to insist on paint’s materiality. Kareken is not proposing an exercise in trompe l’oeil;
instead, his narratives reveal, in addition to their subject matter, something about the
physiology and psychology of perception and the nature of painting.
For the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts (MIA) last year, Kareken made a remarkable nine-by-
fourteen-foot painting called Scrap Bottles (2009), his largest to date. In it, he reversed
his position on several other painting strategies. For instance, he projected the image
onto the prepared canvas and drew the bottles in pencil beforehand, something he had never
done in the past, preferring to find the painting through the process. And, another first, he
painted each object clearly, one after the other. At the MIA, he could view the painting from
a distance and realized that from afar it resembled a photograph but became more painterly,
more abstract as the viewer drew nearer, the way a Chuck Close painting, or a Velázquez,
Green Bottles, 2009, oil on canvas, 66 x 68 inches.
coalesces and dissolves, shifting from paint to image and back again. It was another direction
to explore. Kareken has been much influenced by Baroque painting, by chiaroscuro, a light
Kareken had considered landscape as a possible theme but was not at all interested in
and dark structuring that anchored his previous paintings. In these works, there was no such
traditional pastoral formulations. He found them unconvincing and nostalgic in today’s
distinction. His resolutions had to offer different readings across the more or less immersive
grittier, more complicated world. The recycling centers, however, offered him an infrequently
surfaces, one that was color-based, more kaleidoscopic. In the past, Kareken was not as com-
painted side of the urban landscape to explore, one rife with socio-political-ecological-
fortable with color as he was with black and white, but that, too, has changed.
economic implications. As his paintings focused on the remains of our profligate consumption,
Kareken became more sensitized to environmental issues and the need to conserve our resources,
curb our wastage, rethink our expenditure, and improve our technologies.
BIOGRAPHY: Michael Kareken is a professor of fine arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He received his BA in visual art
from Bowdoin College and his MFA in painting from Brooklyn College, CUNY. In addition to the McKnight Artist Fellowship, Kareken has
been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Bush Foundation, Arts Midwest, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the New York
Foundation for the Arts, the Vogelstein Foundation, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. He received the Louise Nevelson Award for Art
from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has won awards for printmaking and drawing from the National Academy of Design.
Green Bottles (detail), 2009, oil on canvas, 66 x 68 inches.
Kareken has exhibited his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions regionally and nationally. His work is in the collections of the
Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Minnesota Museum of American Art, the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum,
and the Minnesota Historical Society, among others. www.michaelkareken.com
Kareken’s beautifully modulated charcoal and Conté crayon drawings are magnificent evidence
of his mastery of chiaroscuro and are colorful in a subtle way. For him, drawing is more
flexible, he said, built up section by section. Frequently executing his work on drafting
film, he can wet the black pigment with water to get a sweep of nuanced gray and an edge
that appears and disappears, the form in flux, circumscribed and released. With their ravishing
transitions, the drawings recall Rembrandt, Piranesi, Corot, some flooded with light, others
deeply shadowed, mysterious. He has, somehow, managed to sanctify a dumping ground, hallow
its equipment and products.
“I find the sites exhilarating,” Kareken says. The magnet is balletic, and he admires the
surprising delicacy of the metal claw, which can pick up a Coke can without denting it.
One of the loveliest phenomena he describes is the cardboard mountain. Hosed down regularly
in the summer to prevent spontaneous combustion, the water evaporates to envelope it in a
luminous, rainbow mist. This is, perhaps, the primary function of an artist: to present the
familiar, the disregarded in a riveting, persuasive way, to bring attention to it. The new
work of Michael Kareken—his oddly glamorous urban landscapes that function as contemporary
memento mori, with their theme of decay, renewal, and reconciliation, their salutary agenda of
reclamation and redemption—does precisely that.
–Lilly Wei
The McKnight Artist Fellowships for Visual Artists is generously funded by The McKnight Foundation of Minneapolis. Catalog design by Aimee Gauthier, MCAD DesignWorks Photography by Rik Sferra (unless otherwise noted) Copyedited by Mary Keirstead
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